Wheat Does Not Rise as Barley

Now let us see what body he says the dead come in. He goes straight at the point with a happy stroke, as though an objector had pressed him with some such question. “You fool,” he says, “what you sow is not brought to life unless it dies.” From this example of the seed it is already clear that no flesh is brought to life except the flesh that has died; and once that is granted, the whole of the rest of the question will be clear enough. For nothing can be understood here that contradicts the picture the example sets in front of us. Nor does the clause that follows — “what you sow is not the body that is going to be” — give you leave to suppose that at the resurrection a different body rises from the one that was sown in death. Otherwise you have run away from the example. Sow wheat and let it dissolve in the ground, and barley does not come up. Still, it is not the very same grain in kind. Its nature is not the same, nor its quality, nor its shape. Then where does it come from, if it is not the very same? The decay itself is proof of the thing, since it is the decay of that actual grain. [a]

Well then, does the apostle himself not show in what sense “the body that is going to be” is not the body that is sown, when he says, “but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other kind; and God gives it a body as it pleases him”? He gives it, of course, to the grain that he says is sown bare. No doubt. Then the grain is safe, since God has a body to assign to it. But how is it safe if it exists nowhere — if it does not rise again, if what rises is not its own actual self? If it does not rise again, it is not safe; and if it is not even safe, it cannot receive a body from God. Yet there is every possible proof that it is safe. So why will God give it “a body, as it pleases him,” when it already has its own bare body — unless it is so that in its rising it may no longer be bare? What is put over the bare body, then, is additional; and the thing the added matter is laid on is not destroyed by it but enlarged. And whatever receives an increase is safe.

The truth is that it is sown the barest grain there is: no husk to cover it, not so much as a spike in bud, no protection of a bearded top, none of the glory of a stalk. But it comes up out of the furrow rich with a full crop, built into a compact frame, put together in a beautiful order, strengthened by cultivation, and clothed on every side. These are the things that make it another body, and it is God who makes it so; and it is changed into that body not by being abolished but by being enlarged. And “to each seed God has assigned its own body” — its own, though not in the sense of the body it started with, so that what it takes from God from outside itself may in the end be reckoned its own as well. So hold firmly to the example and keep it in view, as a mirror of what happens to the flesh. Believe that the very same flesh that was once sown in death will bear its fruit in the life of the resurrection — the same in substance, only fuller and more complete; not another flesh, though it comes back in another form. For it will receive into itself the grace and the ornament that God is pleased to spread over it, according to what it has deserved.

It is certainly in this sense that he says, “All flesh is not the same flesh.” He does not mean to deny that they share one substance; he means to deny them an equal standing. He is reducing the body to a difference of honor, not of nature. With this in view he adds certain examples, in a figurative sense, from the animals and from the heavenly bodies. “There is one flesh of man” — that is, the servants of God, though they are genuinely human — “another flesh of beasts” — that is, the nations, of whom the prophet actually says, “Man is like the senseless cattle” — “another flesh of birds” — that is, the martyrs, who try to climb up to heaven — “and another of fish” — that is, those whom the water of baptism has put under. In the same way he takes examples from the heavenly bodies: “There is one glory of the sun” — that is, of Christ — “another glory of the moon” — that is, of the church — “and another glory of the stars” — in other words, of Abraham’s descendants. “For one star differs from another star in glory: so there are earthly bodies as well as heavenly ones” — Jews, that is, as well as Christians. Now if this language is not meant figuratively, it was absurd enough of him to set the flesh of mules against the flesh of kites, and heavenly bodies against human ones. There is no comparison between them, either in their condition or in any prospect of a resurrection.

Then at last, having shown conclusively by his examples that the difference was one of glory and not of substance, he adds: “So also is the resurrection of the dead.” How so? In no other way than as a difference in glory only. For he again asserts the resurrection of the same substance, and comes back once more to his grain: “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Now certainly nothing is raised except what is sown; and nothing is sown except what decays in the ground; and what decays in the ground is nothing but the flesh. For the flesh was the substance that God’s sentence pulled down: “Earth you are, and to earth you will return” — because it was taken out of the earth. That is where the apostle got his word for the flesh being “sown”: it goes back into the ground, and the ground is the great storehouse for seed that is meant to be put into it and looked for out of it again. And so he stamps the passage over again with his own authority and says, “For so it is written” — so that you may not take “being sown” to mean anything but “you will return to the ground out of which you were taken,” and may not take “for so it is written” to refer to anything but the flesh.

Some, however, argue that the soul is “the natural body,” meaning by that to cut the flesh off from any share in the body that rises. Now since it is clear and settled that the body which is to rise is the one that was sown in death, they must be summoned to look at the plain fact itself. Otherwise let them show us that the soul was sown after death — in a word, that it underwent death: that it was pulled down, taken apart, dissolved in the ground. God decreed none of this against the soul. Let them display its corruptibility to us, and its dishonor, and its weakness too, so that it may also fall to the soul to rise again in incorruption, and in glory, and in power. [m]

Take Lazarus, the prize instance of a resurrection. It was the flesh that lay there in weakness; the flesh that was all but rotten in the dishonor of its decay; the flesh that stank in corruption — and it was as flesh that Lazarus rose again, with his soul, of course. But that soul was uncorrupted. Nobody had wrapped it in linen cloths; nobody had laid it in a grave; nobody had yet noticed that it “stank”; nobody had watched it lie “sown” for four days. This whole condition, this whole end that Lazarus came to, the flesh of every man is still going through, and the soul of no one. So the substance that the apostle’s entire description plainly points to, the thing he is openly speaking of, must be both the natural body when it is sown and the spiritual body when it is raised. And so that you may understand it in this sense, he points us to that same conclusion when, in the same way, on the authority of that same passage of Scripture, he sets before us “the first man Adam made a living soul.” Since Adam was the first man, and since the flesh was man before the soul was, it follows beyond doubt that it was the flesh that became the living soul. And since it was a bodily substance that took on this condition, it was of course the natural body that became the living soul. What else would they have it called but the thing it became through the soul — the thing it was not before the soul, and the thing it can never be after the soul, except by rising again? For once it has got the soul back, it becomes the natural body once more, so that it may become a spiritual body. In the resurrection it only takes up again the condition it once had.

So there is nothing like the same good reason for calling the soul the natural body that the flesh has for carrying that name. The flesh, in fact, was a body before it was a body with a soul in it; when the soul joined it, it then became the natural body. And although the soul is itself a bodily substance, still, since it is not a body with a soul in it but the thing that puts a soul into a body, it cannot be called the natural body, and it cannot become the very thing it produces. It is when the soul comes to something else that it makes that thing alive with a soul; and if it does not come to something else, how will it ever produce that life at all? So, just as the flesh was at first a body with a soul in it on receiving the soul, at the last it will become a spiritual body when it is invested with the spirit.

Now the apostle, by bringing this order forward in Adam and in Christ separately, fairly distinguishes the two states in the very things that make them differ. And when he calls Christ “the last Adam,” you can see from that how hard he works, all through his teaching, to establish the resurrection of the flesh and not of the soul. So the first man, Adam, was flesh and not soul, and only afterwards became a living soul; and the last Adam, Christ, was Adam only because he was man, and was man only as being flesh, not as being soul. Accordingly the apostle goes on to say, “But that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual” — just as it was with the two Adams. Now do you not think he is distinguishing the natural body from the spiritual body within the same flesh, when he has already drawn the distinction between the two Adams, that is, between the first man and the last? From what substance is it that Christ and Adam stand on a level with each other? From their flesh, beyond question, though it may be from their soul as well. It is in respect of the flesh, at any rate, that they are both man; for the flesh was man before the soul was. It was actually from the flesh that they could be ranked at all, so as to be reckoned the one the first and the other the last man, or Adam. Besides, things that differ in character are incapable of being arranged in one and the same order only when the difference between them is one of substance. When the difference is one of place, or of time, or of condition, they may well enough be classed together. And here they are called first and last from the substance of the flesh they have in common, just as further on the first man is said to be of the earth and the second of heaven. Yet although he is “of heaven” in respect of the spirit, he is still man according to the flesh.

So then, since it is the flesh and not the soul that makes it possible to range the two Adams in one order — so that the distinction between them can be drawn as “the first man becoming a living soul, and the last a spirit that gives life” — this distinction has already led to the conclusion that the difference is due to the flesh. It is therefore of the flesh that these words speak: “But that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” And the same flesh has to be understood in the passage just before it: “What is sown is the natural body, and what rises again is the spiritual body; because that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural: since the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam a spirit that gives life.” It is all about man, and it is all about the flesh because it is about man.

What are we to say, then? Does the flesh not have the spirit even now, in this life, through faith? So the question is still left standing: how can the natural body be said to be sown? Certainly the flesh has received the spirit even here — but only the down payment of it; whereas of the soul it has received not a down payment but the whole. That is exactly why it goes by the name of the natural body: because of the higher substance, the soul, in which it is sown, and because it is destined later on to become, through the full possession of the spirit that it will obtain, the spiritual body in which it is raised. What is surprising, then, if it is more usually named after the substance it is fully furnished with than after the one it has so far only been sprinkled with?

Then again, questions are very often raised by single stray words, quite as much as by whole connected sentences. So, because of the apostle’s expression “that mortality may be swallowed up by life” — which he says of the flesh — they twist the words swallowed up into meaning the actual destruction of the flesh. As though we could not speak of swallowing our bile or swallowing our grief, meaning that we cover it and hide it and keep it inside ourselves! The truth is that when it is written, “This mortal must put on immortality,” we are told in what sense “mortality is swallowed up by life”: it is while, clothed in immortality, it is hidden and covered and held inside it — not consumed and destroyed and lost. But at that rate death must be safe too, once it has been swallowed up. Well then, I ask you to sort out words that look alike according to what each of them properly means. Death is one thing, mortality another. It is one thing for death to be swallowed up, and another thing for mortality to be swallowed up. Death cannot take on immortality; mortality can. Besides, since it is written that “this mortal must put on immortality,” how can that happen if it is swallowed up by life? And how is it swallowed up by life, in the sense of being destroyed by it, when it is in fact taken in, and restored, and held within it? [u]

For the rest, it is only right and just that death should be swallowed up in utter destruction, since death itself devours with exactly that intent. Death, says the apostle, devoured by putting out its strength, and so has been devoured itself in the struggle — “swallowed up in victory.” “Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?” So life too, as death’s great antagonist, will swallow up in the struggle, and for salvation, what death in its struggle had swallowed up for destruction.